Quest’s Back Catalog Could Be A Knockout, But Meta Pulls Its Punches

In a few days Creed III will hit movie theaters. Early word is that it’s a triumph, an “anime-inspired knockout” first feature from star turned director Michael B. Jordan that finds him squaring off against Jonathan Majors in the next chapter of the decades-long boxing saga.

If you’re one of the 20 million or so owners of the Meta Quest 2 you might find yourself hankering for a little cinematic boxing action and decide to look up CREED: Rise to Glory, the boxing title that’s been around since before the original Quest launched. You could pick up the four year old and change title for about thirty bucks, the average price of major titles featured on the Quest Store.

Maybe the Monday before the film drops is a bit too early to say this, there could still be a sale this weekend, but right now this feels like a missed opportunity. Indeed, a survey of the Quest store shows titles that have been on the platform for ages still going for their launch price or a tad less, but rare is the game or even the “Entertainment” category offering — which contains many of the short pieces that we’ve covered over the years here at NoPro — that floats well inside the impulse purchase range.

One of the great strengths of the Steam store, Valve’s 10,000 pound gorilla in the PC space, is the aggressive sales that the platform holds. Steam has arguably too much market power in PC gaming, but it’s undeniable that there’s a legion of gamers out there with Steam libraries well stocked for the apocalypse at this point. (Good luck to all of us trying to download them in the End Times, by the way.)

With so much sales volume there’s an incredibly vibrant PC games market, and while we can’t ignore the fact that PC’s have an install base that eclipses the whole of the VR install base, the market dynamics do seem to support studios taking innovative risks. Every season there are surprise indie games that lead to gamers eating quite well.

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The VR market isn’t nearly as mature, with just three primary platforms — Quest, PC, and PSVR — that means that a game that starts its life on one platform doesn’t have a lot of places to go even if it becomes a hit. If anything that puts more of an onus on Meta to do something to expand the software market for the VR devs it has in close orbit. To combat the reports of Quests being bought and then functionally abandoned a few months later as owners find nothing new to play once the shine has worn off.

While Meta has been chasing its metaversal dreams pouring cash into the Horizon platform that no one seems to love, it has market power it could play by running sales that forgo its 30% store cut or crib notes from the Epic Game Store and do some giveaways which could create some tentpole moments for the VR community.

The earliest days of the XBox360/XBox Live era saw that community flocking from game to game and building its identity around that. Playstation 5 owners have done the same thing around each exclusive release, even short games like Stray have managed to have an outsized impact by being unique and in some ways the only game in town. After years of studios chasing the allure of live service “forever games” the market seems to be waking up to the realization that those are rarities and that gamers as a whole are, at best, serial monogamists.

Even with the trend in Silicon Valley being to slash efforts and reap profits in order to appease Wall Street’s appetite, there’s some simple cards on the table that Meta could tap to generate some real excitement in their most invested user base. That kind of excitement can translate into cultural magnetism, which is a prerequisite for the kind of next generation social platform that the giant wants to create. As Horizon is showing, building it isn’t enough to make the users come. They need to be having fun first and foremost.

So imagine what could happen if suddenly a whole legion of Quest owners were lured back into the ecosystem in the wake of the building buzz around Creed III. What if some of that heat popped up on Reddit, Twitch, and TikTok as gamers stepped into Adonis’ shoes and mixed it up in the ring? Or if Reddit’s VR community lit up the way its PC community did when there’s a Steam sale? It wouldn’t be an iPhone moment, but it would demonstrate to gaming at large that there’s a there there, and might lead to some headsets getting dusted off. Literally.

There’s a chance here to craft a narrative about VR gaming and entertainment, and Meta definitely still has the cash to make that a reality if they are willing to look at the back catalog as a way of building an audience’s identity and not just a revenue stream.

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